Jelastic has launched a major new version of its Java and PHP cloud hosting platform. Now at its version 1.9 release, Jelastic is still characterized by its ultra-scalable and interoperable facets with FTP support, caching in NGINX, and the latest versions of software stacks (including TomEE and MariaDB 10.0.0).

NOTE: NGINX [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. Apache TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is an all-Apache stack aimed at Java EE 6 Web Profile certification. MariaDB is an enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL.

The Jelastic PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) platform was initially launched in October 2011 and now claims to list more than 40,000 users. The firm boasts of winning the Duke's Choice Award from Oracle, due to what has been called a "fundamentally new approach" to cloud hosting of Java applications.

Jelastic CEO Ruslan Synytsky says that while other platforms impose limitations on developers by forcing them to code to specific APIs and adapt their applications to various constraints, Jelastic "maximizes convenience" for its users. "Uploading and deploying an app on Jelastic takes only a few minutes, since the platform is standards-based and can run virtually any Java or PHP application without any code changes," he said.

Jelastic can automatically scale any application so that as an application's load grows, the platform simply makes additional resources available to it. When the load goes down again, the platform reduces the resources.